Advertisements appearing while browsing the World Wide Web are now common place. Online advertisements serve an important role in electronic commerce by providing vendors an opportunity to submit their various items and stock for viewing by consumers. The ability to solicit business from a consumer who is currently viewing a browsing page for content that is not related to the advertisement provides online vendors and businesses with additional chances to garner new sales. In addition, some online advertisements have links included within them that will move a consumer from their current browsing page to a vendor's web page thus providing the user with an opportunity to purchase a specific item included in the advertisement or browse through the catalog of items offered by the vendor.
Advertising services utilize different methods and systems for determining which particular advertisement should be displayed to a user's browsing page. Some systems parse the current browsing page of a user and generate advertisements with content similar to the browsing page. Other systems collect data from a user's recent browsing activity to attempt to provide targeted advertisements to the user based on their viewing history. Some systems utilize the information stored as browser cookies within a browser to help target specific advertisements to users based on their recent activity. However, some users who browse pages find advertisements invasive, boring and distracting. Online advertisements can display content completely unrelated to the current user's interests and thus be ignored at worst or thought of as a waste of space on the browsing page at best. It would be desirable to provide useful information to the user in place of nonrelated advertisements.